Retention: Key Mindsets that Retain Top Talent

Introduction

In April 2019 a headline came across my phone:

Unemployment 49-year low. Average wage hits $27.77 an hour. April jobs +263 K.

I loved what I was seeing, so I clicked on the headline to read further.

A deeper look revealed that a record number of people in the workforce supported a steady increase in demand for goods and services, giving businesses little reason to cut staff, especially with skilled workers so hard to find. As early as 2019, open jobs exceeded the number of officially unemployed Americans by more than a million.

Then COVID-19 arrived and within a few short weeks, unemployment reached historic levels. 1. As of late April 2020, more than 33 million are unemployed for a real unemployment rate of 20.6%—which would be the highest level since 1934. At the time of this printing a staggering 26.5 million people have filed for unemployment.

Now, for me, an entrepreneur with a speaking, leadership training, and human resource (HR) consulting business, I know that periods of low and high unemployment are inevitable, and each situation brings unique challenges to my clients. I also know that in each situation employee retention is a critical component of business profitability and growth. During periods of low unemployment, the labor pool is small, which makes finding the right employee extremely challenging. When unemployment is high, the pool of qualified candidates to fill open positions is larger, and finding a qualified employee is easier. Employers find, however, one constant in both of these scenarios: turnover is expensive. Losing employees is costly, and the money lost would be better utilized to grow business, to boost profit, which in turns creates new jobs and opportunities. Regardless of unemployment data, employee retention is critical to a business’s long-term success and growth.

My own experience confirms the same. From 2014 through 2017 I recruited for a Florida state-run agency and then a private engineering firm in Florida’s panhandle. During those years, employers had an advantage over potential employees because there were fewer jobs than applicants to fill them; it was what I refer to as a buyer’s market. Then the tide turned. Until the COVID-19 scare in early 2020, it was a seller’s market because the employees who were selling their labor were considerably less in number than the amount of jobs employers needed to fill.

In my twenty years in the HR field, working in non-profit, in state government, in private sector companies, and now as a human capital consultant, I have found that many organizations struggle to attract, hire, and retain high value employees, regardless of unemployment numbers. It doesn’t have to be that way though. Within the coming chapters I share principles to help you attract and retain your most valuable asset, your employees! The solutions I provide are not complicated or hard to understand, but they will not be simple or easy to implement. It will require an investment of time, energy, and resources. But most importantly, it will require heart—a genuine care and concern for your fellow man! Without heart, these solutions will be like a song sung without feeling, and few will want to listen. Apply them with sincerity, and your business can help you accomplish all your dreams.

A NEW BEGINNING FOR ME

In March of 2017, I left the engineering firm’s HR department to begin my entrepreneurial career, establishing Colene Rogers and Associates, LLC. From that moment on I was 100 percent responsible for finding the business that would help make money for me and my family. I was way out of my comfort zone! But I believed the relationships I had made in Florida while serving as a member, vice-president, then president of the Big Bend Society of Human Resource Management (BBSHRM) and volunteering with the HR Florida State Council would generate opportunity and help me make the transition.

Quite soon after this, an HR colleague called and said she had an illness in her family and had been offered work she could not do. She asked if I would be interested. Even though it was not consultant work, I was glad and appreciative for the opportunity, being so recently out on my own.

The work was for ABC Company (a fictitious name). At an outdoor party for ABC employees, a female reported that one of the guys had inappropriate contact with her during a kickball game. With all the running around, coupled with the generous flow of alcohol, different interpretations of what exactly happened were provided. In her charge, she added that this was not an isolated incident, but rather a company-wide problem.

This was not the first time ABC had dealt with a sexual harassment case. In the past, they chose to settle other minor cases out of court, not as an admission of guilt, but to save money. I guess this situation got a little more of their attention because they brought me in to do an internal investigation to see if, in fact, they had a problem that went beyond this single event.

Over the next two months I went to eight different states, visited ten different branches, and interviewed forty-three employees comprised of men and women who were company managers, assistant managers, recruiters, and dispatchers. I then wrote and issued a report of my findings. Sitting with the CEO in his office, I told him I did not find evidence to support the charge that the company had a pervasive sexual harassment problem. I shared that I had met many wonderful people in his company and had gained their trust, which allowed them to open up and share their experiences with me. Then I said, But, Mr. CEO, you do have an issue, which I’m sure you are aware of. You have very high turnover.

Of the forty-three people I interviewed for ABC, twenty-two were new hires, having been with the company for less than a year. One third of these new hires were supervisors, managers on the front line, the leaders who set the tone for all the other employees.

I asked the CEO for the opportunity to return another day to discuss the findings from my forty-three interviews because I could shed light on why people were leaving his company and recommend solutions. He agreed, and I was back within the week to speak to him and his colleague. As I described the situation, they both nodded their heads, agreeing with my assessment of the issues. Yet their nods seemed to be saying, As a family-owned business, this is how we’ve done it for over four decades, and there is no need to change what has worked well for us.

In the coming chapters I will show you why this backward facing or the head-in-the-sand approach does not work. Companies cannot ride the wave of yesterday’s successes forever. Continued progress requires staying in step with changing markets and employee mindsets. After all, employees are your company’s most valuable asset.

Part I

Employees’ Mindset

Chapter 1

On Employee Mindsets and Their Importance

The same year I began my consultant business, my sister-in-law, Lori, moved to Tallahassee, Florida where my husband, Jim, and I live. The plan was for Lori to move here, and then have Jim and Lori’s parents soon follow. Their parents had spent many wonderful years as retirees in beautiful Aiken, South Carolina, enjoying some of the best friendships of their lives. But almost all of those friends had moved to other communities, or sadly, passed away. They were now older, so having family nearby to provide companionship and care was something we were all interested in. There was nothing really keeping Lori in Indianapolis or Jim’s parents in Aiken, so they both began taking steps to sell their homes and move south.

Lori first needed a place to work. For several years before her move she had worked in administration at a hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. Not necessarily needing or wanting to stay in hospital administration, she came upon a job opportunity with a fine furniture store with several retail locations throughout Georgia. She had been selling furniture on weekends to make extra money in Indianapolis, so this was not completely new to her. Her thought was to use this job to transition quickly to Tallahassee, get the lay of the land, and when the time was right, find a better opportunity.

After some positive online interaction with the company and a very good phone call with the man who would possibly hire her and be her supervisor, she came to Tallahassee for the in-person interview. She and her would-be boss clicked in the interview, and she learned the true earning potential of the job was much better than she originally thought. Lori began to see the job differently, as possibly more than just a temporary stop along the way. There was money to be made and positions she could pursue beyond the sales floor of the showroom, which is where she would start.

Lori was soon offered the job, and she accepted. With the confidence of having a job lined up, she gave notice to her employer in Indianapolis, sold her home, and officially moved to Tallahassee. It wasn’t long before she was making the thirty-minute daily drive across the Georgia state line to sell fine furniture.

My experience has taught me that in employers’ struggle with turnover and retention (they want to keep employees) many organizations fail to fully recognize what the majority of their employees actually think about working for them. From employee to employee, you may find all sorts and variations of perspectives, but when you consider the employees as a whole, a dominant mindset will emerge.

In Lori’s story, she first thought of the furniture store as a temporary employment solution. It would serve the purpose of getting her to Tallahassee, and after her move, she would zero in on something more permanent. After the interview, though, her thinking shifted. She began to think the job had more long-term potential, seeing more financial opportunity and upward mobility.

Jim and I, being genuinely curious, would consistently ask Lori how things were going at the store. In the beginning, her feedback was mostly positive. She loved her boss! He was a great guy who went out of his way to help her. She was fitting in and her monthly sales numbers were always increasing.

But after about a year’s time, her thinking had changed. When you’ve worked someplace for a year you become quite familiar with the quality of the whole employee experience. Lori learned that retail hours can really get in the way of her life outside the job, and the company didn’t always assist in her efforts to get away from work when there was something important for her to do. As nice and helpful as her boss was, he didn’t always address personality issues brought on by one or two difficult employees who were negatively affecting the entire sales team. These examples (and more) had her again viewing the company as a temporary employment solution. Fast forward one more year and her experience had grown more negative. When asked about the job she would say, I just don’t want to be there anymore. Six more months passed by, and she moved on.

Lori is only one employee’s experience among several other employees at the furniture store. But you can be sure that there are shared positive and negative experiences among employees that determine how the majority perceive the organization, the dominant mindset. There is always a dominant mindset that reveals if the majority of an organization’s employees plan to stay with their company or leave it quickly. If you can discover the dominant mindset in your organization then you can make changes that will substantially lower your turnover rate, which boosts your profit.

THE FOUR MINDSETS

In my work with ABC Company and several other companies as a consultant, combined with the years I have spent as an